Slavery

FEATURED ARTICLES ABOUT SLAVERY - PAGE 3

Big spender To the editor: We have all heard that Jim Humphreys has spent well over $2 million in his smothering campaign to win a seat from the 2nd Congressional District of West Virginia. The salary for that office is $141,300 per year. Something mighty fishy is going on here. As for me and many of my neighbors, Beth Taylor is our pick. She is intelligent, straight-forward, and plans to live in the Eastern Panhandle when elected. Three cheers for Beth. It takes more than major money to give us solid representation.

We're 225 years young and still growing. Happy Birthday, America. Pain and birth. There's always pain in birth, in childbirth, in seeing new truths, in making mid-course corrections and adaptations. There was pain in 1776. The colonists said, "enough is enough," and 13 distinct, unique colonies, "in the course of human events," came together. They shelved some of their individuality to become one. And in the hour that "tried men's souls," God raised up George Washington. He had to face the pain of leadership, the loneliness and isolation of command, the agony of making difficult decisions.

"What is the purpose of reforming public education with this plan of a Race to the Top? Since we in America are sending more and more jobs to other countries where the pay scale is lower, where are all these Race to the Top graduates going to go to be employed?" - Hagerstown "I wanted to applaud Tom Wilhelm of Williamsport for his letter on what the free passes they get when they cross our borders. I think that all our Congress people should read this: Bartlett, Munson, every one of them, Barbara Mikulski.

HAGERSTOWN -- A novel about slavery set in the 1850s inspired a discussion about hip hop, literacy and the modern slavery of materialism Monday morning when author James McBride visited North Hagerstown High School to speak to Washington County high school students and guests from the community. McBride's "Song Yet Sung," a tale of escaped slaves, free blacks and slave catchers on Maryland's Eastern Shore, was selected by the Maryland Humanities Council for this year's One Maryland One Book program, which encourages Marylanders from across the state to read and discuss one common book.

Sitting on her knees atop a quilt her father bought at a flea market, Fanny Crawford listened to him tell her a bedtime story. On occasion, like this time, the bedtime stories Bill Crawford told his 5-year-old daughter were true family stories. It was the story of her great-great-grandfather, Henry Barnes, who was born into slavery near Richmond, Va., circa 1818, and as a child was taken away from his family and sold to a Hagerstown man. The woman Henry remembered as his mother gave him a quilt to remember where he came from, said Crawford, 61, who lives in Hagerstown's North End. Crawford said as a child, she would lie in bed sometimes running her hands across her own quilt as she thought of Henry and what it must have felt like for him to be torn away from his family.

andrear@herald-mail.com Blacks in Washington County share a local history rooted along a less-than-one-quarter-mile stretch in downtown Hagerstown. Jonathan Street has housed, fed, entertained - and sometimes frightened - many of its black residents for more than two centuries. Jonathan Street is so named only through the black district. The street is mostly white on each end, where it's known as Summit Avenue to the south and Forest Drive to the north. That is a point of contention among those who believe this makes it easy for the city to profile a Jonathan Street address as a black address.